Top all-time · #7070
Jeff Sandberg
Personal blog · pdx.su/blogprogrammingweb
Jeff Sandberg's personal blog at pdx.su covers programming and web. Since 2023, 11 different Hacker News readers have linked it 43 times, most often “CSS Is Fun Again”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-09, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (2) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
Linked as a source for a 2023 post with a screenshot of Reddit's original compact mobile interface. Commenters cite it when discussing Reddit removing that interface and its effect on old.reddit.com.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 2 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
The personal blog of software engineer Jeff Sandberg
Most-linked posts?
- CSS Is Fun Again3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2023-10-29
- /blog/2023-04-06-rip-reddit-compact/3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2023-04-19
- Fixing a broken smart cat feeder with ESP322 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2024-01-22
- The quiet software tooling Renaissance2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2025-08-31
- Writing in Djot2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-08-31
- Reading my electric meter with RTLSDR2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2024-03-18
What Hacker News says?
I bemoaned devs refusing to learn their tools myself https://pdx.su/blog/2023-07-26-tailwind-and-the-death-of-cra...
Comment linking /blog/2023-07-26-tailwind-and-the-death-of-craftsmanship/
on “Shopify acquires Tailwind”Submitted CSS Is Fun Again as a story · 226 points
HN discussionI've made arguments like this in the past, and my position hasn't changed much https://pdx.su/blog/2023-07-26-tailwind-and-the-death-of-cra...
Comment linking /blog/2023-07-26-tailwind-and-the-death-of-craftsmanship/
on “Shopify acquires Tailwind”Submitted Fixing a broken smart cat feeder with ESP32 as a story · 87 points
HN discussionhttps://old.reddit.com We used to have an even denser display, but they sadly got rid of it. It was the original reddit mobile interface (served as a webpage, not an app). There is a screenshot on this blog post (by one of the guys who worked on it): https://pdx.su/blog/2023-04-06-rip-reddit-compact/
Comment linking /blog/2023-04-06-rip-reddit-compact/
on “Ask HN: What are good high-information density UIs (screenshots, apps, sites)?”Submitted Tailwind CSS and the death of web craftsmanship as a story · 48 points
HN discussionThis is very similar to my experiments, and something I was mulling over enough when I wrote the original comment, that I wrote a rant about it: https://pdx.su/blog/2024-12-29-using-kagi-for-a-bit-over-a-y...
Comment linking /blog/2024-12-29-using-kagi-for-a-bit-over-a-year-now-heres-what-i-think/
on “Google's Results Are Infested, Open AI Is Using Their Playbook from the 2000s”Submitted Reading my electric meter with RTLSDR as a story · 31 points
HN discussionNo worries. JJ tends to fit modern software engineering a bit better than git, I've found. Here's sort of an example of what I do when I'm working with it I'll open an empty change on top of the main branch, not really sure about where this feature is going to go but knowing that it needs to be new changes. Usually this is already done for me automatically because my main synced with the remote, and therefore is an…
Comment linking /blog/2025-08-13-the-quiet-software-tooling-renaissance/
on “Jujutsu for everyone”Submitted Fixing a broken smart cat feeder with ESP32 as a story · 6 points
HN discussionI've been enjoying JJ recently, after giving it another try. I'd tried it when it was new, and the sharp corners were still a bit too sharp for my liking. JJ seems to be part of a new "era" of tooling that's just really good. I mused about this a bit in a blog post: https://pdx.su/blog/2025-08-13-the-quiet-software-tooling-re...
Comment linking /blog/2025-08-13-the-quiet-software-tooling-renaissance/
on “Jujutsu for everyone”Submitted The quiet software tooling Renaissance as a story · 3 points
HN discussionHere's my writeup: https://pdx.su/blog/2024-03-17-reading-my-electric-meter-wit... It's based on rtlamr, which might still be a non-starter for you, but it should point you in the right direction. Most of what I did was just turn-key assembly of existing code, but you might be able to make something work by digging through how rtlamr works
Comment linking /blog/2024-03-17-reading-my-electric-meter-with-rtlsdr/
on “Fifty Things you can do with a Software Defined Radio”Submitted Writing in Djot as a story · 3 points
HN discussionI used lit for a few small components on my blog, https://pdx.su , and have mostly ignored them since writing them two years ago. When I recently had to update them with a new feature, I was extremely pleased that the usual js experience of finding out that I was a million versions behind wasn't there.
Comment linking /
on “Lit: a library for building fast, lightweight web components”Submitted Rest in Peace, Reddit Compact as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI recently moved my personal writing to John MacFarlane's djot. It's a markup language that grew out of his markdown improvements blogpost, where he explored the issues, and possible fixes, he discovered while creating the common mark standard. I've no regrets since then https://pdx.su/blog/2025-06-28-writing-in-djot/
Comment linking /blog/2025-06-28-writing-in-djot/
on “Markdown is holding you back”Submitted A Good Shower as a story · 1 points
HN discussionWe've got @scope back now, and, while it's not exactly the same as it was in the early part of the 2010s, it's still pretty good, as it let's you set both upper and lower bounds for a block of css. Being able to say "these selectors don't apply below this point" is immensely powerful, letting you build donut styles for components very easily It wasn't quite ready when I wrote a sort of follow up article[1] about new…
Comment linking /blog/2023-10-25-css-is-fun-again/
on “DaisyUI: Tailwind CSS Components”Submitted CSS Is Fun Again as a story · 1 points
HN discussionI've been complaining about this for years, even writing an article on it. When the article initially made it's rounds on HN it was divisive. People seem to have cooled off a bit on tailwind since then, which is good, but you still see it being dumped into new projects, or originating things like this that attempt to build a facsimile of what we get "for free" in the browser https://pdx.su/blog/2023-07-26-tailwind-a…
Comment linking /blog/2023-07-26-tailwind-and-the-death-of-craftsmanship/
on “DaisyUI: Tailwind CSS Components”Submitted CSS Is Fun Again as a story · 1 points
HN discussionAuthor of the blog post here. I've felt the same way. I wrote a big article griping about tailwind[1] earlier this year, that was somewhat controversial here on hn, but the feelings extend to other bolted on attempts to "fix" css throughout the past. I don't use svelte much, but Vue, Lit, and Surface all have the same css scoping stuff too, and it's wonderful. [1] https://pdx.su/blog/2023-07-26-tailwind-and-the-deat…
Comment linking /blog/2023-07-26-tailwind-and-the-death-of-craftsmanship/
on “CSS Is Fun Again”Submitted Some Elixir Testing Tricks as a story · 1 points
HN discussionI've felt this way for years, even wrote a blog post [1] about it nearly 2 years ago It doesn't seem to be getting better, sadly. You get posts like the op, where the author realizes there's something wrong with how they're doing things, but then misses that tailwind is a big part of it. Emperor has no clothes, so everyone else strips naked as well 1: https://pdx.su/blog/2023-07-26-tailwind-and-the-death-of-cra...
Comment linking /blog/2023-07-26-tailwind-and-the-death-of-craftsmanship/
on “Selfish reasons for building accessible UIs”Submitted The Little Things Matter as a story · 1 points
HN discussionPreprocessors have solved things fairly well for a while now https://pdx.su/blog/2023-07-26-tailwind-and-the-death-of-cra... This article is coming up on two years old, and still holds true. You can just now do a lot of the things that required external tooling in plain css
Comment linking /blog/2023-07-26-tailwind-and-the-death-of-craftsmanship/
on “Knowing CSS is mastery to front end development”Submitted I wish Asciidoc was more popular as a story · 1 points
HN discussionBest place to start is probably some form of "permanent Christmas lights" You install them along the trim of your house, like you would with traditional lights. You can then use them for all sorts of things. Flag colors for patriotic holidays. Bright pastels for spring. Christmas can be any mix of red green and white, hanukkah can be blue and white, etc They let you start soft, with something that doesn't need xligh…
Comment linking /blog/2024-08-10-diy-permanent-xmas-lights/
on “The software you need for holiday overdecoration”It's very impressive how expressive and flexible the compilers in the BEAMverse are. Elixir extends this rather far, and there are whole utilities such as Surface[1] that are built atop and make heavy use of custom compilers For more germane blogging and ssg in elixir/beam, I use and recommend the excellent tableau generator[2], by Mitch Hanberg. I use it to power my own personal site[3], and publish the source[4] f…
Comment linking /
on “My Blog Engine Is the Erlang Build Tool”